Silence or Death in Mexico's Press

Preface by Joel Simon

Plomo o plata. Lead or silver. It’s a well-worn phrase in Mexico, one that’s all too familiar to the country’s journalists. It means, simply, we own you. Take our plata (slang for money) and publish what we tell you. Or we kill you.

The plomo
is highly visible.

Bodies
of journalists litter the streets in Mexico,
from Durango to Villahermosa. More than 30 journalists have
been murdered or have gone missing since December 2006, when President Felipe
Calderón Hinojosa came to power. CPJ has confirmed that at least eight of these
journalists were killed in direct reprisal for their work.

What
has been less visible is the plata. Journalists don’t generally talk
about it, understandably. In this report, we reveal the culture of bribery and
extortion that is producing devastating self-censorship in Mexico.
Journalists in Reynosa
confided in CPJ and told us the whole story—the threats, the violence, and the
corruption.

Why do
criminal organizations care so much about what’s printed in the newspapers or
broadcast on radio and TV? It’s not a simple matter of suppressing some
damaging stories. Their motives are much more complicated, and much more
sinister.

When I
was a reporter in Mexico
in the 1980s and ’90s, journalists used to tell me that they didn’t worry about
printing the names and faces of the country’s most powerful cartel leaders. In
fact, the journalists claimed, the capos loved the attention because reports on
their ruthlessness stirred fear among their enemies.

Reporting
on the web of corruption that supported the drug trade was another matter. The
cartels made investments in buying the cooperation of corrupt police, mayors,
governors, soldiers, and customs agents, all of whom became integral to their operations.
If you exposed this network and got some official fired, you were disrupting
their business. That was dangerous, although some brave reporters still took
the risk.

In
2004, I traveled to Tijuana
to carry out a CPJ investigation into the murder of my friend and colleague
Francisco Ortiz Franco, an editor at the muckraking newsweekly Zeta. In
the course of my reporting, I came to understand the new ways in which rival
cartels were using the media to further their illicit interests.

First,
they suppressed stories about their own violence while paying journalists to
play up the savagery of their rivals. More important, they used the media to
damage competing operations by planting stories about corrupt officials. The
impact of these stories was profound; a corrupt police chief in whom one cartel
had invested huge sums might be forced to resign. And not all the journalists
who played the game were corrupt. They didn’t know that their sources, often in
law enforcement, were working as public relations agents for the cartels.

In the
ensuing years, competing cartels throughout the country developed aggressive
media tactics. They use corrupt journalists as a key component in their all-out
battle for control of the “plaza,” as the narcos call the drug market.

The
traffickers rely on media outlets they control to discredit their rivals,
expose corrupt officials working for competing cartels, defend themselves
against government allegations, and influence public opinion. They use the
media in a manner not that different from that of a traditional political
party—except they are willing to use deadly means to attain their public
relations goals. It is unsurprising then that as the drug war has intensified,
violence against the press has escalated. U.S. correspondents, once ignored,
are threatened regularly now.

Competing
criminal organizations are controlling the information agenda in many cities
across Mexico.
Some news organizations have tried to opt out, refusing to cover anything
related to the drug trade, even if that means ignoring shootouts in the street.
But the traffickers don’t always take no for an answer; journalists report
being forced to publish stories attacking rival cartels.

President
Calderón and the Mexican federal government need to do more—much more—to defend
the media and create an environment in which journalists can do their jobs with
some degree of safety. Calderón needs to take decisive action not only because
the federal government has a constitutional responsibility to guarantee free
expression. Safeguarding press freedom is in his own strategic interest. He
cannot win the drug war if he cedes control of public information to the
narcos.

Journalists
should be reporting on the carnage wrought by the competing cartels. They
should be reporting aggressively and fairly on the underlying corruption that
supports the drug traffickers. They should be reporting on government efforts
to battle the drug trade, highlighting both the failures and successes.

In
many cities, they are doing none of these things. The reality is that the
government is being outflanked in the information war, just as it is on the
streets. As this report makes clear, the battle for the free flow of
information in Mexico
has reached a crucial phase. Unless the Mexican government takes bold action,
the narcos will continue to define what is news and what is not. That is no way
to win the drug war.

Joel Simon is executive director of the
Committee to Protect Journalists.